Missing Ranks and Altered Pipework: Restoration Decisions

A replica rank is reconstruction, and reconstruction is a treatment with its own threshold rather than an extension of restoring the instrument. The OHS guidelines define reconstruction as work depicting vanished or nonsurviving portions of an organ, undertaken when documentary and physical evidence survive and conjecture is minimal. They state that conjectural reconstruction should be avoided whenever possible, and where conjecture becomes necessary they require measures to avoid deception about the origins of the reconstructed components rather than forbidding the work outright. The practical test for a missing rank is therefore whether documents and physical evidence can establish what the rank was. If the honest answer is a guess, the guidelines point toward leaving the gap, or toward a reconstruction that is openly and permanently identified as conjectural.

In the OHS taxonomy, conservation is the umbrella term, treatment is one of its four activities, and restoration is one of four kinds of treatment alongside stabilization, maintenance and reconstruction. That hierarchy is the OHS guidelines’ own, and its consequence for this decision is direct: a proposal that builds replica ranks is proposing reconstruction of those ranks and should say so, even when the rest of the work is restoration.

The evidence can come from the instrument itself, from records, and from the same builder’s other work. At Mechanics Hall in Worcester, the Noack Organ Company’s early-1980s restoration of E. & G.G. Hook Opus 334 used, in the venue’s words, “old photographs and scavenged parts of damaged Hook organs” to reconstruct “an instrument very close to its authentic self.” That is a venue narrative rather than a technical report, and it does not state which components were transferred, but it shows the shape of an evidence base: photographs of the instrument as it stood, and physical material from the same builder’s damaged instruments. That kind of evidence base exists for some builders and some instruments and not for others, and its absence is a real limit on what can honestly be reconstructed.

The first question is often whether the missing material is gone at all. At the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, much of the original Skinner pipework of Opus 634 was removed and sold off in the mid-1970s to make way for Baroque additions, and the 2005-2006 project recovered original pipes from storage and built replicas for the ranks that had been lost. Recovered original material comes before any replica, so a search of storage, records and related instruments belongs at the front of the decision.

A replica rank and a recovered original rank are two different categories of material, and a documented project records them separately. The Rockefeller Chapel record of the 2005-2006 Schantz work on E. M. Skinner Opus 634 lists restoring stored original pipework and building replicas for lost or damaged ranks as distinct items, alongside restoring all original Skinner chancel windchests and reservoirs, completely rebuilding the chancel console inside its original Goodhue-designed case, adding a new two-manual gallery console, and adding twenty-two new ranks to reach 132 ranks and 8,565 pipes. The finished instrument therefore holds at least three kinds of pipework: original material returned to the instrument, replica pipework standing in for lost material, and new ranks that never had an original. Each has a different standing, and the instrument’s record is what keeps them apart.

The record has to name which ranks are replica and which are original, because nothing in the finished instrument does that on its own. A replica rank built to the evidence is a legitimate treatment. The OHS guidelines, even where conjecture is unavoidable, require measures to avoid deception about the origins of reconstructed components, and the written record is what serves that principle once the pipes are in the instrument. The treatment proposal should say which ranks it proposes to reconstruct and on what evidence, and the treatment report should say which ranks were built new, so that the owner’s record set carries the distinction forward to the next technician.

How originality is then assessed across an instrument that holds original, replica, retained and new pipework belongs to the originality guidance in this neighborhood, reached through the restoration and rebuilding hub.

What is missing from an altered instrument is the trace of a previous intervention, and reading that intervention comes before deciding what to do about it. Andover Organ Company’s project record for Johnson & Son Opus 577 of 1882 shows the pattern. In the 1930s, work by William Bardroff & Son left “the original console, stop and key action” destroyed and “a new electric console” placed at a distance from the organ; the stencilled decoration on the case pipes was covered with later paint; and the instrument was eventually unplayable. The restoration that began in 1991 studied Johnson instruments of the same period, refinished the ash case, made new panels to replace ones destroyed by wiring and lighting, and had the case pipes restored to their original stencilling and colors by Marylou Davis, Inc., with the original voicing retained.

Two changes made for present-day use, a pedal extended to 30 notes and a pitch change to A=440, are stated in the same record as departures from strict restoration. That is one firm’s description of its own project, but it separates the three things a reader needs to see separately: what was irrecoverably lost and had to be made new, what survived and was recovered, and what was deliberately changed and disclosed. A gap read that way is evidence about the instrument, not simply damage to be made good.

Ranks that were added are part of the alteration history in the same way as ranks that were removed. The history of the organ at High Street Congregational Church records that after installation in Maine the instrument received an added Nazard and a three-rank Octave Chorus with new casework, was completely releathered in 2007, and received a new Italian Flute 2′ stop in 2008, with all of that work performed by David E. Wallace & Co., LLC, of Gorham, Maine. Those stops are not missing anything; they are later material with a documented origin, and any decision to keep or remove them is a decision about that documented layer.

Altered pipework can also mean pipework that came from somewhere else. Among the composite-instrument patterns each documented at a named instrument are earlier pipework carried into a later instrument, a new instrument that absorbed identified ranks from the earlier organ on the same site, and an instrument assembled from parts of several organs. When the rank in a slot is not the one the builder put there, the question is not only whether to reconstruct the original but what the present rank is, where it came from, and whether its own history is worth keeping. Those records establish that the patterns occur, not how common they are.

At some point missing material stops being a few ranks to reconstruct within a restoration and becomes reconstruction of the instrument. The American Theatre Organ Society’s restoration guidelines, adopted in 1992 for theatre organs, use the term reconstruction for the process undertaken when a substantial number of original components are missing or in bad condition. ATOS does not put a number on substantial, and the OHS threshold is stated as minimal conjecture rather than as a count of ranks, so neither body offers a figure. What both give the reader is the question to put to any proposal: taken together, how much of the pipework does this proposal build new, and at what point does that total make the project reconstruction rather than restoration of the instrument, whatever the proposal calls it.

Each of the three choices is legitimate in the right conditions, and the conditions are about evidence and disclosure. Reconstructing a replica rank is appropriate where documentary and physical evidence survive and conjecture is minimal, and where the replica is recorded as a replica. Leaving the gap is the conservative answer where the evidence does not support a reconstruction, since the guidelines say conjectural reconstruction should be avoided whenever possible. Accepting the alteration keeps a documented later state as the instrument’s present state, with the additions and substitutions recorded as the layer they are.

Which of these fits a particular instrument cannot be inferred from a stoplist or a photograph; it follows from physical and documentary evidence gathered for that instrument. Whether the instrument should be taken back toward an earlier design at all, and whether the work is tonal or mechanical in scope, are separate decisions with their own pages, reached through the restoration and rebuilding hub.

The decision therefore starts with an examination that identifies what is missing, what is in storage or otherwise recoverable, and what the documents support, and it ends with a record that names every replica rank as a replica and every departure as a departure. That examination and that record are the two ends of the project plan for any instrument with missing or altered pipework.